Whitehall's impatience with media pressure over the pace and direction of the campaign against terrorism boiled over yesterday when Jack Straw accused the press and TV of constantly demanding fresh news, while increasingly neglecting the causes of the conflict.

Mr Straw likened the problem to the "Kosovo wobble" that hit the bombing campaign against Serbia after three weeks in 1999. "We had exactly the same headlines. This is why the press in a sense have almost no humility and no memory. Many of the commentators who are now saying this is a mistake were saying Kosovo was a mistake," he recalled.

The eruption came as Tony Blair led his ministers and officials in confirming that "time and patience" would be needed to bring the global terrorist networks under control. "It will take as long as it takes. As in any campaign, you can't be precise in terms of duration," his spokesman said.

Downing Street later used almost identical language to point out that Kosovan refugees had gone home and Slobodan Milosevic is to go on trial for war crimes, as Nato had promised all along.

Mr Straw, who flies to Warsaw and Moscow this week to shore up coalition solidarity, told BBC's Breakfast with Frost that the prime minister was right to identify a problem with "a reporting culture which is very, very short-term". He said: "It constantly wants to change the story forward. The other thing is that it lacks memory backwards."

Faced with a more sophisticated use of the media by Osama bin Laden and his allies than they had expected - an echo of the war for Kosovo - Mr Blair and his closest advisers are desperate to remind people of the September 11 atrocities in New York and Washington which killed between 4,000 and 6,000 people.

Their memorial service yesterday was attended by the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, as well as 5,000 of the bereaved. Mr Blair later spoke by telephone to President Bush whose special envoy, Richard Haas, said the air strikes had been "99%-plus" effective.

Explaining where he felt the media had lost sight of the issues, Mr Straw said: "What we know is that, unless we do take action of this kind, deeply regrettable as it is, this kind of atrocity will go on and the scale of it will mount.

"I'm not just saying that, because if you think about what Bin Laden's done in the past it's astonishing, when I talk to people in my constituency, how short memories are because they're not reminded of this," he said.